Archive for the ‘EO’s Satellite Puzzler’ Category

This image was acquired on June 27, 2015, by the Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8. Read more about the image here.

What was that brain-like pattern featured in our July puzzler and how did it form? The key insight—which none of the hundreds of readers who commented noted—was that the pattern was caused by a network of stream valleys and bands of vegetation in Somaliland. (Read our July 26 Image of the Day to find out why the vegetation grows in bands). However, reader Stephanie Wurdinger did nail the location on both Facebook and our Earth Matter blog. “This is along the north coast of Somalia between Dayaha and Maydh, in Sanaag region. Mt Shimbiris is just off the upper right hand corner of this image. I believe it is part of the Maydh greenstone belt,” she wrote.

One of the more interesting things about the forests of the Cal Madow is that they are important sources of frankincense and myrrh, the fragrant resins made famous by the Biblical account of three kings bringing them to Bethlehem as gifts. For a more modern take on the frankincense and myrrh trade, check out the video put together by the the Institute for Environmental Diplomacy and Security at the University of Vermont. Skip ahead to mintute 2:30 to join the producers as they bump over rough mountain roads in Somaliland looking for frankincense. The same organization has posted a report about the frankincense industry in Somaliland with many more details.

Every month on Earth Matters, we offer a puzzling satellite image. The July 2015 puzzler is above. Your challenge is to use the comments section to tell us what part of the world we are looking at, when the image was acquired, what the image shows, and why the scene is interesting.

How to answer. Your answer can be a few words or several paragraphs. (Try to keep it shorter than 200 words). You might simply tell us what part of the world an image shows. Or you can dig deeper and explain what satellite and instrument produced the image, what spectral bands were used to create it, or what is compelling about some obscure speck in the far corner of an image. If you think something is interesting or noteworthy, tell us about it.

The prize. We can’t offer prize money, but, we can promise you credit and glory (well, maybe just credit). Roughly one week after a puzzler image appears on this blog, we will post an annotated and captioned version as our Image of the Day. In the credits, we’ll acknowledge the person who was first to correctly ID the image. We’ll also recognize people who offer the most interesting tidbits of information about the geological, meteorological, or human processes that have played a role in molding the landscape. Please include your preferred name or alias with your comment. If you work for or attend an institution that you want us to recognize, please mention that as well.

Recent winners. If you’ve won the puzzler in the last few months or work in geospatial imaging, please sit on your hands for at least a day to give others a chance to play.

Releasing Comments. Savvy readers have solved some of our puzzlers after only a few minutes or hours. To give more people a chance to play, we may wait between 24-48 hours before posting the answers we receive in the comment thread.

Many readers were convinced that our June Puzzler (image above) showed Nazca lines in southern Peru. There certainly were lines in the image, but they were located about 10,000 kilometers (6,000 miles) away from Peru on a plateau in southern Libya. While the Nazca lines were probably created for religious purposes, the grid lines in Libya had a very different raisond’être: oil exploration.

As Stefano correctly noted at 12:26 p.m. on June 23, the lines were tracks left over from a seismic survey. While a layer of rocks, gravel, and ancient stone tools carpet most of the plateau, lines of large “thumper” trucks that use a vibrating metal plate to press down against the ground likely created the grid pattern. When they drove around prospecting the area with seismic sensors, the trucks kicked up a very fine layer of dust that was lighter brown than the rest of the surface. Less than two hours after Stefano weighed in, Miles Saunders explained much of this.

Twenty minutes later, Franco B. weighed in with some more key details. “This looks like geophysical prospection lines in some oil field in an arid zone, each line would be a succession of geophones placed in order to make seismic sections. The scattered dots are probably oil wells. The combination of lines at 90º allows to make very detailed 3D maps of the geological structures in depth, in order to improve the oil and gas exploration. All this overlays on what looks like an intermittent dendritic drainage pattern, evidence of the arid climate,” he said.

To get a sense of how the “thumper” trucks work, check out the video below from Maurin Media.

Here is a view of what the tracks look like on the ground.

Photograph courtesy of Marta Lahr, University of Cambridge.

Meanwhile, twelve minutes before Stefano mentioned seismic lines on our blog, Kaye Simonson noted on our Facebook page that the grid was related to seismographs. About ten minutes later, Chris Leonard posted the exact coordinates on Facebook. By that afternoon, Leonard had figured out that the image featured seismic grid lines related to oil exploration. He worked it out by locating an archaeological study published in PLOS One that included the telling figure shown below. As the authors of that paper explain, the top part of the figure (a) shows the location of the grid lines that were laid out for oil exploration. The middle part (b) shows where archaeologists discovered stone tools (lithics) during a sweep before the seismic survey. A white circle indicates the presence of tools; larger circles indicate a higher density of stone tools. The bottom part (c) shows a more detailed view of a small portion of the plateau.

Every month on Earth Matters, we offer a puzzling satellite image. The June 2015 puzzler is above. Your challenge is to use the comments section to tell us what part of the world we are looking at, when the image was acquired, what the image shows, and why the scene is interesting.

How to answer. Your answer can be a few words or several paragraphs. (Try to keep it shorter than 200 words). You might simply tell us what part of the world an image shows. Or you can dig deeper and explain what satellite and instrument produced the image, what spectral bands were used to create it, or what is compelling about some obscure speck in the far corner of an image. If you think something is interesting or noteworthy, tell us about it.

The prize. We can’t offer prize money, but, we can promise you credit and glory (well, maybe just credit). Roughly one week after a puzzler image appears on this blog, we will post an annotated and captioned version as our Image of the Day. In the credits, we’ll acknowledge the person who was first to correctly ID the image. We’ll also recognize people who offer the most interesting tidbits of information about the geological, meteorological, or human processes that have played a role in molding the landscape. Please include your preferred name or alias with your comment. If you work for or attend an institution that you want us to recognize, please mention that as well.

Recent winners. If you’ve won the puzzler in the last few months or work in geospatial imaging, please sit on your hands for at least a day to give others a chance to play.

Releasing Comments. Savvy readers have solved some of our puzzlers after only a few minutes or hours. To give more people a chance to play, we may wait between 24-48 hours before posting the answers we receive in the comment thread.

Congratulations to reader John Radford for being the first to solve our May 2015 puzzler. As John noted: “It is East Java looking across Surabaya towards Bali and further islands. The numerous lights in the Java Sea must be mostly fishing boats though the cluster dead center may be partly Pulau Kangean lights. The yellowish isolated light about 3/4 of the way up and left of center must be Makassar. The white flash to its left probably is lightning strike onto West Sulawesi proper. The entire landscape is volcanic in origin, Indonesia being the most volcanically active country in the world, at the junction of 4 tectonic plates.” Congratulations also to Claudia for being the first reader who noted it was a photograph taken by an astronaut on the International Space Station. The perspective isn’t exactly the same, but below is a view of the same general area from Google Earth.

Every month on Earth Matters, we offer a puzzling satellite image. The May 2015 puzzler is above. Your challenge is to use the comments section to tell us what part of the world we are looking at, when the image was acquired, what the image shows, and why the scene is interesting.

How to answer. Your answer can be a few words or several paragraphs. (Try to keep it shorter than 200 words). You might simply tell us what part of the world an image shows. Or you can dig deeper and explain what satellite and instrument produced the image, what spectral bands were used to create it, or what is compelling about some obscure speck in the far corner of an image. If you think something is interesting or noteworthy, tell us about it.

The prize. We can’t offer prize money, but, we can promise you credit and glory (well, maybe just credit). Roughly one week after a puzzler image appears on this blog, we will post an annotated and captioned version as our Image of the Day. In the credits, we’ll acknowledge the person who was first to correctly ID the image. We’ll also recognize people who offer the most interesting tidbits of information about the geological, meteorological, or human processes that have played a role in molding the landscape. Please include your preferred name or alias with your comment. If you work for or attend an institution that you want us to recognize, please mention that as well.

Recent winners. If you’ve won the puzzler in the last few months or work in geospatial imaging, please sit on your hands for at least a day to give others a chance to play.

Releasing Comments. Savvy readers have solved some of our puzzlers after only a few minutes or hours. To give more people a chance to play, we may wait between 24-48 hours before posting the answers we receive in the comment thread.

Congratulations to reader Suzi for being the first to answer our April puzzler. As Suzi noted, the image shows South Korea’s Sisan Island. While Suzi (and several other readers) thought the offshore grid pattern was evidence of oyster or fish farming, our research suggests it is mainly seaweed farming. Severalsourcescited the western part of South Korea’s south coast as the main area of seaweed production, and aerial imagery of seaweed farms match the general appearance of our satellite image.

However, Suzi’s comment did prompt me to look more closely at the distribution of oyster farms and other types of aquaculture in South Korea, and it does seem possible that some of the patterns in the puzzler could be evidence of oyster aquaculture. Are there aquaculture experts or South Koreans reading this who are willing to share their opinion? Is this all seaweed or a mixture of seaweed and other types of aquaculture?

I suspect it may not be possible distinguish between seaweed farming and other types of aquaculture at Landsat’s resolution, but I would love to see somebody with more expertise prove me wrong. In the meantime, you can read what we published about this area as our Image of the Day on April 25, 2015.

Every month on Earth Matters, we offer a puzzling satellite image. The April 2015 puzzler is above. Your challenge is to use the comments section to tell us what part of the world we are looking at, when the image was acquired, what the image shows, and why the scene is interesting.

How to answer. Your answer can be a few words or several paragraphs. (Try to keep it shorter than 200 words). You might simply tell us what part of the world an image shows. Or you can dig deeper and explain what satellite and instrument produced the image, what spectral bands were used to create it, or what is compelling about some obscure speck in the far corner of an image. If you think something is interesting or noteworthy, tell us about it.

The prize. We can’t offer prize money, but, we can promise you credit and glory (well, maybe just credit). Roughly one week after a puzzler image appears on this blog, we will post an annotated and captioned version as our Image of the Day. In the credits, we’ll acknowledge the person who was first to correctly ID the image. We’ll also recognize people who offer the most interesting tidbits of information about the geological, meteorological, or human processes that have played a role in molding the landscape. Please include your preferred name or alias with your comment. If you work for or attend an institution that you want us to recognize, please mention that as well.

Recent winners. If you’ve won the puzzler in the last few months or work in geospatial imaging, please sit on your hands for at least a day to give others a chance to play.

Releasing Comments. Savvy readers have solved some of our puzzlers after only a few minutes or hours. To give more people a chance to play, we may wait between 24-48 hours before posting the answers we receive in the comment thread.

The answer to the March 2015 puzzler, most commenters agreed, involved snow and ice and cold climates. A great many guesses correctly zeroed in on far northern latitudes, with surmises about pipelines in Alaska, airport runways in Siberia, railroad sidings, and ice roads on frozen lakes. You can see the full answer and image reveal in our March 22, 2015 Image of the Day.

Reader James Simard was the first to get the location fully correct as the winter road in Canada’s Northwest Territories. James wrote:

The world’s longest ice road connects Yellowknife to three diamond mines: Ekati, Diavik, and Snap Lake. Of the 475 kilometers (300 miles) of ice road, 86 percent of it is across frozen lakes.

The ice road is the only overland supply route for the mines. Each winter, a year’s worth of fuel, construction material, heavy mining equipment, and explosives are trucked to the mines. The road provides the most cost-effective method for transporting these supplies.

However James went a step further and said that it was Landsat 8 image (yes!) from April 10, 2014 (alas, no). It turns out my puzzler choice was something that the USGS Earthshots posted online (and James’ detailed quote is from that page). If I had known the USGS folks had run this before, I would not have selected it as a puzzler. This image is actually a much more recent Landsat 8 image from February 24, 2015. I actually stumbled on it while purusing the daily images from a sister satellite instrument, EO-1’s ALI, but the Landsat image three days later covered more of the winter road. Nice find, James! Clearly I need to comb through the Earthshots page in the future first!

I also want to give a special shout-out to reader Shirley. She also got the right answer, giving the full name of the Tibbett-Contwoyto Ice Road. However, she did have an inside track on the answer. She wrote: “My company works on the road every year.”

On Facebook, many people posted correct answers (including James one minute after he posted the answer here). Some readers locked into the correct answer after recalling episodes of the History Channel’s TV series Ice Road Truckers, which focused on the Tibbett-Contwoyto Ice Road during its first season.

If you would like to know more about the Tibbett-Contwoyo Ice Road, check out the references cited on our Image of the Day answer.

Every month on Earth Matters, we offer a puzzling satellite image. The March 2015 puzzler is above. Your challenge is to use the comments section to tell us what part of the world we are looking at, when the image was acquired, what the image shows, and why the scene is interesting.

How to answer. Your answer can be a few words or several paragraphs. (Try to keep it shorter than 200 words). You might simply tell us what part of the world an image shows. Or you can dig deeper and explain what satellite and instrument produced the image, what spectral bands were used to create it, or what is compelling about some obscure speck in the far corner of an image. If you think something is interesting or noteworthy, tell us about it.

The prize. We can’t offer prize money, but, we can promise you credit and glory (well, maybe just credit). Roughly one week after a puzzler image appears on this blog, we will post an annotated and captioned version as our Image of the Day. In the credits, we’ll acknowledge the person who was first to correctly ID the image. We’ll also recognize people who offer the most interesting tidbits of information about the geological, meteorological, or human processes that have played a role in molding the landscape. Please include your preferred name or alias with your comment. If you work for or attend an institution that you want us to recognize, please mention that as well.

Recent winners. If you’ve won the puzzler in the last few months or work in geospatial imaging, please sit on your hands for at least a day to give others a chance to play.

Releasing Comments. Savvy readers have solved some of our puzzlers after only a few minutes or hours. To give more people a chance to play, we may wait between 24-48 hours before posting the answers we receive in the comment thread.